3. Finance and Hours of Labor. 4. Freedom of Mind in Willing; or, Every Being that wills, a Creative First Cause. 5. Two Letters, on Causation, and Freedom in Willing, addressed to John Stuart Mill. With an Appendix on 3. Paraguay, and the Alliance against the Tyrant 4. Correspondencia Diplomatica entre el Gobierno del Paraguay y la Legacion de los Estados Unidos de America, 5. Executive Documents, United States Senate. Doc. No. 5, Parts 1, 2, 3. Message of the President, commu- nicating Information in Relation to Recent Transactions in the Region of the La Plata. Navy, in Answer to a Resolution of the House, trans- Miscellaneous Documents, United States House of 6. Revue des deux Mondes; 1865, 1866, 1867. 7. Papeles del Tirano del Paraguay, tomados por los Aliados en el Asalto de 27 de Diciembre de 1868. VII. CRITICAL NOTICES Müller's Chips from a German Workshop, 544.-Bushnell's Women's Suffrage, and Mill's Subjection of Women, 556. Nicolas's Quatrains de Khèyam, 565.- Friedrich Rückert and his Works, 584.— Baldwin's Pre-historic Nations, 594. — Kirk's History of Charles the Bold, 596.Noeldeke's Alttestamentliche Literatur, 602.-Evans's Deutsche Literaturgeschichte, 606. - Publications of the Prince Socie ty, 609.- Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea, 612. LIST OF SOME RECENT PUBLICATIONS 544 620 ERRATUM. Page 488, line 2 from bottom, for northwest, read northeast. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. No. CCXXV. OCTOBER, 1869. ART. I.-THE GENESIS OF LANGUAGE. If the revival of Greek learning in Erasmus's time has been appropriately termed the "new birth" of the European intellect, we may signalize, as a hardly less astonishing renaissance, the consequences which in our own day have flowed from the renewal of intercourse, after a separation of perhaps fifty centuries, between the oldest and the youngest members of the Aryan race. By the English conquest of India our horizon of speculation has been vastly and suddenly widened. Our etimologic doctrines have undergone extensive remodelling. Our inquiries into the course and conditions of human development have assumed a broader aspect. The myths and fairytales of Indo-European antiquity, - the weird fancies of primeval nature-worshippers, previously unintelligible, are now seen to be fraught with marvellous significance. While, with regard to the science of language, it will suffice to mention that, in the sixty years which have elapsed since the publication of Schlegel's Weisheit der Indier, we have traced a large proportion of the grammatical forms in the Aryan languages back to their primitive significations; that we are now in possession of a method by which, after due inspection, we can classify all dialects, spoken or written, living or dead; that we have begun to obtain trustworthy evidence as to the civilization, the domestic life, and the intellectual habits of our ancestors, many ages before the dawn of authentic history; VOL. CIX. NO. 225. 20 that we have deciphered the long-forgotten idiom in which the mythical Zarathustra proclaimed to his Bactrian countrymen the religion of light; and that we can read, through the wedgeshaped symbols in which they are engraved, the royal edicts of Dareios Hystaspes, containing the same courtly titles which the exiled Themistokles may afterwards have used in his daily salutations to the Achæmenid monarch. It is hardly necessary to say that these splendid results are not due merely to a series of happy guesses. They have been obtained by the patient examination of paradigms and vocabularies, by the careful analysis of grammatical forms, and the study of phonetic changes, conducted for the most part in strict accordance with inductive methods. Etymology is no longer, as in Voltaire's day, a science in which consonants go for little and vowels for nothing; but it is a science in which every change of vowel or consonant must be referred to general, albeit empirical, principles of utterance. The time has gone by for such linguistic feats as those performed by Blackstone, who derives parson from persona,* because the parson impersonates the church, and Webster, who, without a twinge of compunction, derives preach (Lat. prædicare) from the Hebrew barak, "to bless"! In striking contrast to such proceedings, we now find scholars like Max Müller refusing to admit the identity of such words as cura and care, corvus and crow, oxos and whole; the similarity, which formerly led so * A derivation which Worcester cites without the least suspicion of its absurdity. Parson is a compression of parochianus," one belonging to a parish." He who seeks good etymologic wheat in our popular dictionaries is likely to get sorry chaff for his pains. Mr. Crabbe, for instance, tells us that the good old Saxon doze is "a variation from the Fr. dors, and the Lat. dormio, to sleep,' which was anciently dermio, and comes from the Greek dépμa, ' a skin,' because people lay on skins when they slept." (!!) English Synonymes, s. v. "Sleep." Strange that he should have forgotten the Hebrew damam, "to keep silence"; nay, what more apposite than dabhar, "to speak," for people sometimes talk in their sleep! In a similar mood, M. Benci, a sapient Italian critic, has derived giorno (Lat. diurnus) from O. H. G. horn, because the Alemans and Franks announced the arrival of day by blowing a horn! See Lewis, Romance Languages, p. 220. Most of the ancient etymologies were thus obtained from a mere play upon the sound of words. See instances in Lersch, Sprachphilosophie der Alten, III. 113, 184, and elsewhere; and compare the derivation of Agamemnon from 'Ayaσròs éπiμový in Plato's Kratylos, XIV., and that of dinos from Taş piy lapidh = σróμa λaμrádos, in Philo. See Gesenius, Gesch. d. Hebräischen Sprache, § 23; Lobeck, Aglaophamus, pp. 867 -869. = = = great a scholar as Buttmann to assert the kinship of such words, now constituting the chief obstacle to an admission of their common origin. For it has been ascertained that, as a general rule, when a word begins in Greek or Latin with a tenuis, it cannot, in English (unless directly imported from those languages), have the same initial letter, but must begin with the kindred aspirate. Thus we have kapd-ía cor-d = heart, cornu=horn, tres=Tpeis three; tu thou; and it is therefore stated that if cura and corvus are to be discovered in English, they must be sought among words beginning with h, not among words beginning with c or k, while whole, if it existed in Greek, could hardly be anything else than xóλos. It may indeed turn out that a too obstinate adherence even to Grimm's Law may, in some cases, be proof of rashness, since it is, at best, an empirical generalization, which has from time to time encountered serious exceptions.* Nevertheless, the mere fact that such plausible derivations are so vigorously challenged, and obliged to search so narrowly for proofs of genuineness before they can be accepted, shows forcibly that in etymology mere guess-work is no longer permissible,† and that in tracing the pedigree and kinship of words, similarity in sound, even when accompanied by identity of meaning, is by no means an infallible criterion. Words starting from the remotest sources have not seldom been ground down into exactly the same shape. If we have never heard the French souris, "mouse," identified with souris, smile," it is doubtless because no one has had a pet theory to * See Guest's criticisms in Proceedings of the Philological Society, III. 179, fol'g. Many exceptions to Grimm's Law are only apparent. The Zend thri (English three) may appear anomalous when compared with Sanskrit tri. But it follows the peculiar rule in Zend that y, r, w, m, n, and the sibilants, roughen a preceding tenuis; as ughra for Sanskrit ugra; pathni for Sanskrit patni. See Spiegel, Altbaktrische Grammatik, p. 71. Buttmann's identification of whole and λos must be given up, no doubt; but I cannot agree with Müller as to corvus and cura. In the older Roman orthography, c is used to represent the medial sound of g, and q is the only tenuis guttural; so that corvus and cura, being pronounced gorvus and gura, are brought into strict conformity with the law which they have been supposed to violate. Even in later times we find continual confusion between Caius and Gaius, Cnaus and Gnæus. Compare Donaldson, Varronianus, p. 292. "Armenian hayr is the same as Lat. pater, not because, as a general principle, p is changeable into h, but because it can be proved by facts to be so in Armenian, where pes (foot) is het; pancha (five) is hing; wûp (fire) is hour." Müller, in Bunsen's Outlines, I. 327. |